Jarrett Walker's personal notes on places, arts, plants, and the search for home.

2014.10.23

Sam Harris's Waking Up: An atheist's guide to the limits of "atheism"

Sam Harris’s Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion presents itself as a guide to meditation for the skeptical atheist, one that can separate the practice and insights of meditation from the quasi-religious claims that often accompany how it is taught in the west. The book builds on Harris’s intellectual atheism (laid out in more detail in The End of Faith) and integrates it with his years of experience with meditation, including intensive retreats of many months duration. Anyone seeking spiritual clarity from an atheist or agonistic starting point will find it a beautiful and challenging read.

On my second pass through, Waking Up, I've finally come to enjoy it as an intellectual thriller: How far can an atheist go in describing the immense and permanent mystery of consciousness while still defending the rigid markers of his atheism -- notably his insistence on disparaging the category (never well defined) of "New Age"?

Consider the facts as Harris presents them: Consciousness is the substrate of absolutely every human experience. It's not the same as its contents (thought and sensation). It's not the same as the illusory self or "I". In split-brain experiences, it can be divided in two, like a river dividing around a rock (p62). Speaking of rocks, we can't be sure that nonliving things are not conscious (p59), which implies we have no basis for denying that consciousness might be anywhere and everywhere. Finally, in tales of the adept, consciousness seems to converge with something we might call love.

No aware and curious human being, no matter how atheist, can live with this set of facts without feeling overwhelming, urgent curiosity about something that is outside the scientifically verifiable world. We humans crave an understanding of consciousness in the same way that we need a creation story or a foundation for our ethics. If science won’t provide one, then we’re going to speculate, intensely and passionately, and we're going to believe what we need to believe in order to make sense of this mystery. Harris has made a powerful case for the necessity of mysticism, speculation, faith, or whatever you want to call it.

But Harris shoves us further beyond pure skepticism. The facts of consciousness match the core insights of the traditions we call animist, pagan, or "New Age," despite his longing to shun those categories. While their sillier extremes may look like theism, these traditions are theist only the the loose sense that Hinduism is, where any gods are understood as manifestations of a greater consciousness but not as final authorities in themselves. Once you accept a notion of transcendental consciousness, any atheist disapproval of Krishna or Green Tara or Quetzlcoatl is as trivial as disapproving of someone's style of dress; these creatures are all just shifting manifestations, nothing to get stuck on. Indeed, to call these deities polytheist is to accept a monotheist's categories, which amounts to endorsing his incomprehension.

I wonder, too, if it's fair to describe as "atheist" a world-view that can only be validated in Harris's personal experience. His confident claim that consciousness is more than its contents (p127) rests on his testimony about his own journeys in extreme meditation. One needn't doubt his story to point out that as evidence, it has the same status as any religious hero's tale of meeting God in the wilderness. We can't verify his tale, so it requires us to believe him. But if we're believing in something we can't verify, are we still atheists? We're certainly not skeptics.

What is atheism, at the end of this book? Perhaps the term is indeed as weak and vague as this would suggest. Perhaps, as Harris proposes in Letter to a Christian Nation, "atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs." Perhaps atheism is coherent only with respect to Abrahamic monotheism. Or perhaps it's just agnosticism (the word I always preferred) armored with exclamation points.

What is clear is that the atheist/theist dualism is just as dualistic as any other. Arguably, too, the very notion is Abrahamic. Is Harris still an atheist? And are we, if we accept the lessons of his experience as ours?